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Those that deny the happy life to the plants on the ground
that they lack sensation are really denying it to all living
things.
By sensation can be meant only perception of state, and the state
of well-being must be Good in itself quite apart from the
perception: to be a part of the natural plan is good whether
knowingly or without knowledge: there is good in the appropriate
state even though there be no recognition of its fitness or
desirable quality- for it must be in itself desirable.
This Good exists, then; is present: that in which it is present
has well-being without more ado: what need then to ask for
sensation into the bargain?
Perhaps, however, the theory is that the good of any state
consists not in the condition itself but in the knowledge and
perception of it.
But at this rate the Good is nothing but the mere sensation, the
bare activity of the sentient life. And so it will be possessed
by all that feel, no matter what. Perhaps it will be said that
two constituents are needed to make up the Good, that there must
be both feeling and a given state felt: but how can it be
maintained that the bringing together of two neutrals can produce
the Good?
They will explain, possibly, that the state must be a state of
Good and that such a condition constitutes well-being on the
discernment of that present good; but then they invite the
question whether the well-being comes by discerning the presence
of the Good that is there, or whether there must further be the
double recognition that the state is agreeable and that the
agreeable state constitutes the Good.
If well-being demands this recognition, it depends no longer upon
sensation but upon another, a higher faculty; and well-being is
vested not in a faculty receptive of pleasure but in one
competent to discern that pleasure is the Good.
Then the cause of the well-being is no longer pleasure but the
faculty competent to pronounce as to pleasure's value. Now a
judging entity is nobler than one that merely accepts a state: it
is a principle of Reason or of Intellection: pleasure is a state:
the reasonless can never be closer to the Good than reason is.
How can reason abdicate and declare nearer to good than itself
something lying in a contrary order?
No: those denying the good of life to the vegetable world, and
those that make it consist in some precise quality of sensation,
are in reality seeking a loftier well-being than they are aware
of, and setting their highest in a more luminous phase of life.
Perhaps, then, those are in the right who found happiness not on
the bare living or even on sensitive life but on the life of
Reason?
But they must tell us it should be thus restricted and why
precisely they make Reason an essential to the happiness in a
living being:
"When you insist on Reason, is it because Reason is resourceful,
swift to discern and compass the primal needs of nature; or would
you demand it, even though it were powerless in that domain?"
If you call it in as a provider, then the reasonless, equally
with the reasoning, may possess happiness after their kind, as
long as, without any thought of theirs, nature supplies their
wants: Reason becomes a servant; there is no longer any worth in
it for itself and no worth in that consummation of reason which,
we hold, is virtue.
If you say that reason is to be cherished for its own sake and
not as supplying these human needs, you must tell us what other
services it renders, what is its proper nature and what makes it
the perfect thing it is.
For, on this admission, its perfection cannot reside in any such
planning and providing: its perfection will be something quite
different, something of quite another class: Reason cannot be
itself one of those first needs of nature; it cannot even be a
cause of those first needs of nature or at all belong to that
order: it must be nobler than any and all of such things:
otherwise it is not easy to see how we can be asked to rate it so
highly.
Until these people light upon some nobler principle than any at
which they still halt, they must be left where they are and where
they choose to be, never understanding what the Good of Life is
to those that can make it theirs, never knowing to what kind of
beings it is accessible.
What then is happiness? Let us try basing it upon Life.
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